Inside the world of Grigory Perelman: the man who solved the world's toughest maths problem proves to be a puzzle himself.

He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century.

Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43-year-old Russian mathematician, has consciously spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit. He lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St. Petersburg, while neighbours complain that his own studio flat, which he seldom uses, has become a breeding ground for cockroaches.

Now he has proved again, and in spectacular fashion, that he despises society's conventional norms. Picking up the telephone last week, the bearded genius, who is jobless, found himself being offered an academic prize worth $1 million.

He politely but tersely told the prestigious American institute offering him the prize that he would have to consider whether he wanted to accept the money or not.

"He said he would let me know at some point," Jim Carlson, President of the Clay Mathematics Institute, told The Sunday Telegraph.

"He did not give a sense of timing but I do not expect it will be tomorrow. He is more than extremely brief. He does not say too much," he added, explaining that Mr Perelman had not said why he would need to think about such a windfall.

"It is not every day that a person even entertains turning down a million dollars."

The Russian has turned down high honours before. In 2006, he was offered and declined the Fields Medal, the mathematical world's equivalent of a Nobel Prize. He said at the time he was

The source of all blessing is through Israel, the Hebrew nation. From this truth, an interesting study arises when researching the etymology of innovative ideas.

The greatest number of inventions and innovative technology has originated via Hebrew lineage. While not always attributed to Jewish founders, it is interesting to observe how many inventions were solely from Jewish roots, and how many which claim to be independent of Jewish roots, happened to have had Jewish acquaintances about the time preceding their reported innovative discoveries.

Many innovations are spiritually communicated prior to any human communication.

21
posted on 03/28/2010 2:50:56 AM PDT
by Cvengr
(Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)

And if he does get a job at Mickey D’s, I am sure he’ll be the only one who will know what a McGangBang is when someone tries to order it. BTW, I had one, er made one, the other day and it’s actually quite good! And only for $2 +tax!!!

McGangBang = McDouble + McChicken Sandwich both from $1 menu. Sandwich the whole McChicken between the Mcdouble and enjoy!

You can see people try to order the McGB on youtube.

22
posted on 03/28/2010 2:52:23 AM PDT
by MAD-AS-HELL
(Hope and Change. Rhetoric embraced by the Insane - Obama, The Chump in Charge)

And no one bothers to ask or define ... what the hell is Poincare's conjecture??

For compact 2-dimensional surfaces without boundary, if every loop can be continuously tightened to a point, then the surface is topologically homeomorphic to a 2-sphere, usually just called a sphere. The Poincaré conjecture asserts that the same is true for 3-dimensional surfaces.

(Like .. I even understand THAT !!?!!)

26
posted on 03/28/2010 3:11:01 AM PDT
by knarf
(I say things that are true ... I have no proof ... but they're true)

IIRC this book addresses this question somewhat. Among other things it says says that in Jewish history and culture, a religious scholar was always seen as a good match for the daughter of a rich merchant.

Good call. I think the character played by Russell Crowe, game theorist John F. Nash jr., got to suffer from schizophrenia around his 30th year, and only seemed recovered in his mid-fifties.

In turn this reminds me of the life story of head Beach Boy Brian D. Wilson. He was terribly abused in his youth, and around his 25th year, he developed ‘schizo-affective disorder’, a close relative of schizophrenia. He heard voices in his head that threatened to kill him. But he also heard the most beautiful music imaginable in his brain. And put it on paper, and on record. Wilson got into the claws of a psychologist who sought total control of his patient; and that man prescribed him enormous quantities of legal, but not appropriate drugs. As a result, Wilson experienced horrible setbacks, physically and mentally, for long years. Only around his 50th year he began to wrestle himself loose from that ‘doctor’. (That man, BTW, had snuck so deeply into Wilson’s life that he got his patient to change his will and leave half of his fortune to the doc, as a reward for ‘saving his patient’s life’).

Wilson fought and got back. I saw him live in London and Amsterdam, with superb shows, in 2002 and 2004. He’s recording two new albums now, one with Disney songs, and one with works by George Gershwin.

No, you're the first one. Actually, Herrnstein and Murray attribute it to genetics, iirc. They are more specific and attribute the difference to Ashkenazi Jews who are typically about 15 points higher in IQ than average folks.

39
posted on 03/28/2010 5:37:40 AM PDT
by Lonesome in Massachussets
(The naked casuistry of the high priests of Warmism would make a Jesuit blush.)

I wondered the same thing, so I went looking. This was one explanation that I thought was understanble, somewhat:

A proposition in topology put forward by Henri Poincaré in 1904. Poincaré was led to make his conjecture during his pioneering work in topology, the mathematical study of the properties of objects that stay unchanged when the objects are stretched or bent. In loose terms, the conjecture is that every three-dimensional object that has a set of sphere-like properties (i.e., is topologically equivalent to a sphere) can be stretched or squeezed until it is a three-dimensional sphere (a 3-sphere) without tearing (i.e., making a hole) it. Strictly speaking, the conjecture says that every closed, simply-connected three-manifold is homeomorphic to the three-sphere.

Poincaré proved the two-dimensional case and he guessed that the principle would hold in three dimensions. Determining if the Poincaré conjecture is correct has been widely judged the most important outstanding problem in topology  so important that, in 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute in Boston named it as one of seven Millennium Prize Problems and offered a $1 million prize for its solution. Since the 1960s, mathematicians have shown by various means that the generalized conjecture is true for all dimensions higher than three  the four-dimensional case finally falling in 1982. But none of these strategies work in three dimensions. On Apr. 7, 2002 came reports that the Poincaré conjecture might have been proved by Martin Dunwoody of Southampton University, but within a few days a fatal flaw was found in his proof. Then, in April 2003, what appears to be a genuine breakthrough emerged during a series of lectures delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics (part of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg). His lectures, entitled "Ricci Flow and Geometrization of Three-Manifolds," constituted Perelman's first public discussion of important results contained in two earlier preprints. Mathematicians will now scrutinize the validity of Perelman's work (which does not actually mention the Poincaré conjecture by name). In any event, the Clay Institute calls for a two-year cooling-off period is required before the prize can be awarded.

manifold A mathematical object that, in geometrical terms, is nearly "flat" on a small scale (though on a larger scale it may bend and twist into exotic and intricate forms). More precisely, a manifold is a topological space that looks locally like ordinary Euclidean space. Every manifold has a dimension, which is the number of coordinates needed to specify it in the local coordinate system. A circle, although curved through two dimensions, is an example of a one-dimensional manifold, or one-manifold. A close-up view reveals that any small segment of the circle is practically indistinguishable from a straight line. Similarly, a sphere's two-dimensional surface, even though it curves through three dimensions, is an example of a two-manifold. Seen locally, the surface, like that of a small portion of the Earth, appears flat. A manifold that is smooth enough to have locally well-defined directions is said to be differentiable. If it has enough structure to enable lengths and angles to be measured, then it is called a Riemannian manifold. Differentiable manifolds are used in mathematics to describe geometrical objects, and are also the most natural and general settings in which to study differentiability. In physics, differentiable manifolds serve as the phase space in classical mechanics, while four dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifolds are used to model spacetime in general relativity.

homeomorphic In topology, two objects are said to be homeomorphic if they can be smoothly deformed into each other.

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